“As part of our annual planning process, we are making head count adjustments across the company — small reductions in a couple of places and aggressive hiring in many others,” a spokesman told the Seattle Times. “For affected employees, we work to find roles in the areas where we are hiring.”

Amazon has been on a hiring spree in recent years, and has about 4,000 open job listings in Seattle. But CEO Jeff Bezos and other execs have been focused on trimming “lower performers” and excess spending.

“People are in terrible shape,” one Amazon employee told The Seattle Times. “There is so much stress on campus.”

2017 was a banner year for the e-commerce kingpin, with the company adding 130,000 employees. And in the last year, shares of Amazon stock have increased more than 50 percent — vaulting Bezos to the top of the billionaire food chain in the process. After acquiring Whole Foods midway through the year, its full and part-time employee count swelled to more than 550,000 workers.

At the same time, Amazon has narrowed its search for its second North American headquarters to 20 cities, including Dallas, Chicago and New York City. Amazon said it plans on investing up to $5 billion and adding 50,000 new jobs when it picks the winning city.

The Facebook co-founder purchased The New Republic in 2012, becoming executive chairman and publisher. However, he sold the venerable political magazine to Win McCormack in 2016, saying he "underestimated the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today’s quickly evolving climate."

The eBay founder is a well-known philanthropist who created First Look Media, a journalism venture behind The Intercept. Inspired by Edward Snowden's leaks. Omidyar teamed up with journalists Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras to launch the website “dedicated to the kind of reporting those disclosures required: fearless, adversarial journalism.”

The PayPal co-founder doesn’t own a news organization, but he makes this list because he essentially ended one -- Gawker -- proving once again the power of an angry billionaire. Thiel secretly bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s sex-tape lawsuit against Gawker Media because he was upset that the website once outed him as gay. Hogan won the defamation lawsuit against the site that sent its parent company into bankruptcy, and Gawker.com is no longer operating.

OK, so Facebook isn’t technically a news organization… yet. However, the company is preparing to launch its much-anticipated lineup of original content later this summer, and there are also signs that it's on the verge of becoming an even bigger media platform.

Campbell Brown, Head of News Partnerships at Facebook, confirmed last week it’s developing a subscription service for publishers willing to post articles directly to Facebook Instant Articles, rather than their native websites.